He, as a doctor, had perceived a patient’s weight to be the problem. What if it was actually a solution? What if his patient’s weight was a psychological and emotional barrier, something protecting her from harm? That would go a long way toward explaining why his most successful patients, the ones who had peeled off that protective layer, were so desperate to put it back on. Felitti suspected that he might have glimpsed a hidden relationship between histories of abuse and obesity. To
